Hacktivists help rights campaigners get their message out

By Kim ZetterJuly 23 2002
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By all accounts, Wang Ruowang wasn't much of a techie. But the 83-year-old dissident writer, a thorn in the Chinese Government's side until he died in January, would have appreciated the efforts of a couple of guys named The Pull and Oxblood Ruffin.

They belong to an activist hacking group called Hacktivismo, which created a new steganography tool to help circumvent Internet censorship in countries such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The browser tool, called Camera/Shy, was released as open-source software and works with Windows and Internet Explorer. It lets non-techie users easily encrypt and hide information in .gif files posted on uncensored Web pages.

The aim is to allow democracy and human-rights activists to deliver information that wouldn't usually be accessible to people behind national fire-walls.

With little effort, a user can embed content in an image, post the image on a Web page, then notify fellow activists via e-mail about where to find the images, being careful to disguise the intent of the e-mail.");document.write("

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Only surfers who know where the info is, have Camera/Shy loaded on their computer and possess a password to decrypt the content can see the hidden message. Since it's important not to tip off authorities running surveillance on e-mail, images would be posted on the types of sites sanctioned by the government.

Ruffin envisages, for instance, that dissidents in China could set up fake pro-communism sites that the government wouldn't suspect contain dissident material. He expects that sites won't stay up long, so that traffic patterns won't draw suspicion.

Hacktivismo was founded by Ruffin and has 35 members in North America, Australia, Europe, Israel, Russia, Korea and Taiwan. The group is an offshoot of Cult of the Dead Cow, the hacking group responsible for creating Back Orifice, a Trojan horse that lets hackers take over an infected computer.

Ruffin says the aim of Hacktivismo is "to keep the Internet free in the way it was originally intended to be", and aid activists in their struggles for freedom. The Internet has become a powerful tool for disseminating information and putting pressure on abusive and autocratic governments.

Last year, hacktivists broke into computers of the World Trade Organisation to steal credit card numbers belonging to government and business leaders attending meetings of the World Economic Forum. They did it to publicise opposition to economic globalisation.

Patrick Ball, deputy director of the Science and Human Rights program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says that technology has become increasingly important for organisations to document human-rights abuses. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a free cryptography tool, is used to secure communication that has life-or-death implications.

But Ball says programs used by human rights workers need to be simple, since few foreign activists are computer savvy.

Camera/Shy meets that requirement. The program was cobbled together over a few days in May by The Pull, a vulnerability researcher for eEye Digital Security, a firm in California noted for finding software security holes.

Ruffin knows the program won't last long. "Obviously governments will try to respond to this so we expect it to have a certain shelf life as a technology." (Just two days after the release of Camera/Shy, US company NetIQ released software it said will detect and eliminate Camera/Shy.)

Ruffin says NetIQ's claim is ridiculous. Because the program is published open source, users can easily alter the code, thus frustrating detection methods. "There will be hundreds if not thousands of iterations of Camera/Shy . . . The footprint they're checking for can't be found when the code is changed, even slightly."

Ruffin says human rights groups aren't the only ones who have been interested. "There have been all kinds of policymakers, right-wing groups and Christian groups who've been trying to throw money at us. Christian fundamentalists want these types of programs to get the Good Word into China."

Hacktivismo isn't interested, however. "A lot of these groups want a proprietary product. They want to control the technology; they don't want to share it. We would never get involved in something that's not open source." That wouldn't be very democratic.